Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics: Indiana Luxon and the World’s Fastest Indian (Trade Deal)

Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly, mostly satirical column on politics that appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings.

By the time you read this, New Zealand will have a free trade deal with India. Or it won’t. Or it will have sometime. Or it will have soon. Or soonish. Or not so soonish. Or maybe sometime in the next 60 days. Or the next six months. Or next six years. Or by the next election. Or after the next election. Or never.

It is quite possible that in the multitude of parallel universes out there, all of these things will be true at the same time. Not that anyone in this particular universe knows right now or possibly cares.

Apart, of course, from the Prime Minister, the unpopular multimillionaire Christopher Luxon, who is surely desperate for good economic news now he’s back from his four days on the outer rim of a galaxy called Wishful Thinking, where he spent time breathing out lots of hot air on the planet Hyperbole.

The near-manic enthusiasm on display during Luxon’s trip to India was certainly something to behold. So, too, was what read like frothy fan fiction from some of our media who accompanied Luxon and his contingent of business types and ministers on their jolly outing.

When all is said and done, there is only one thing we peasants know with absolute certainly and that is that talks about a free trade deal with India are definitely going to happen — just like they did 10 years ago when John Key was PM.

What is not so certain is whether those talks, as they did then, will amount to a mountain of nothing. Or what Luxon might be privately prepared to agree to do to get the deal done by the 2026 election, which was the wild, off-the-cuff promise he made during the 2023 election campaign.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accused by critics of being an authoritarian, of ramping up sectarian rhetoric and of weaponising state agencies against his opponents, seemed quite keen that India “continue to receive the support of the New Zealand government” in taking action against what Modi called “anti-India activities by some illegal elements in New Zealand”, which sounds rather sinister, because it is.

Luxon downplayed these comments. But who knows what commitments a desperate prime minister might allow himself to consider behind closed doors? Luxon, after all, is the guy who agreed to support, to the first reading, the highly divisive Treaty Principles Bill so that he might get a coalition deal with the Act Party, even though the bill was not, according to Act, a red line in negotiations.